章 6: The Arrival Of Things
And when I awoke, I was nothing. Then I became a cell.
The first cell to ever exist. It shuddered and split. The first cell gave birth to the second. Then they split and the third and fourth were made. Then the eighth. Then the sixteenth. They numbered in the hundreds only a few splits later. That became thousands. Then millions. They numbered in the hundreds of millions.
Slowly the cells blossomed into formations like cabbage patches, growing into eachother until all the clump of gray mater began to resemble something I could recognise. The telltale, fleshy architecture of the human brain. Festooned with veins but dry of blood. There was no heart to supply it. I felt coils of nerves stretch out from my brain; milky undeveloped eyes grew from the small nerves while the bigger nerves twisted and thickened into coiling spinal cord. The cells were numbering in the trillions now, but they didn't stop. Rather they continued to split and double, then fuse together by the trillions to become tissue. The tissue stitched themselves into organs and bones, and was criss-crossed by thick muscle and leathery skin.
Slowly the disembodied brain encased in a skull, and within it pulsated and swelled with blood flow. The body had been formed and now the lifeblood was being pumped through newly created veins. I had been birthed at last. My nerves finally began to register proper feeling; at first just twitching sensations that glittered and danced precariously out of reach; but slowly became tangible, real impulses that could be interpreted and acted upon. I began to feel arms and legs moving together in motion, and l think I was walking along something unclear. When my retinas were formed and my sight returned I looked down. My suspicions were confirmed.
I was walking. I was walking along a flat plane of colorless featureless land that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. There was no landmarks, no grooves or hills in the ground. It was perfectly smooth. I looked up and saw there was no horizon, no sun or moon, I don't think there was even an atmosphere. All I saw was space and peculiar colorful dots. With every step I felt like I was sinking; everything shuddered and rippled like a still winter pool when disturbed. But despite the experience I felt perfectly, absolutely calm.
I looked up again when my vision became clearer and saw how without an atmosphere to choke it or sunlight to smother it, the night sky burned in awesome contrast. Those weren't dots — those were stars. And every inch of the sky was covered in them, which existed alongside twirling constellations and vast clouds of frothing multicolored nebulae. All of it matched any sun in brightness, and the celestial light illuminated the land like it was ground zero to a meteor shower. But with no atmosphere, I shouldn't be able to breathe. There was no air. There wasn't even an atmosphere. And yet my lungs still breathed, heaving in imaginary air and exhaling with steady breathy rhythm.
Eventually the impossibility hurt my head to think about, so I accepted it all as the truth, and the thought faded from my mind. I didn't know what this place was. I had never seen somewhere like this before, where the night were cold and everything was still, but the constellations stitched together to make infinite paisleys in the skies. I think I was alone; the only thing that accompanied me was the stinging cold and the light of the night sky. But instead of worry or suspicion or paranoia or brutal terror, all I could feel was a tranquil calm, like everything was right in the world. So I walked. I don't know how long for, but it must have been an hour. Wherever I was going or what direction I was heading, I didn't know. With no real indication of my direction, any attempt to determine so would have been worthless guesswork. To be honest, I think I was walking because that's the only option I had.
The hour turned to two hours, and I still walked. But now the ground had begun to soften, grown further and further like I was traversing across the plane on my tip-toes but I couldn't be. After a while I could no longer feel my feet on the ground. I looked down and I realised I wasn't on the ground anymore. Rather I was in mid-air, ascending upwards with every step I took. It was a surreal sight that made my brain pulsate painfully in my skull just trying to comprehend how it could happen, yet when I stopped considering the impossibility it felt as natural as breathing.
I saw no reason to stop, so I carried on, and the ground began to ebb away beneath my feet. I went up five feet in the air, then ten feet, then twenty. I ascended with every step like an angel out of some fairy tale, until after an indeterminate time I was miles up. So far up in the sky, the ground had become smooth and monotonous, but it was only after what felt like hours when I crossed a few dozen miles could I truly understand the scope of the plane. Now I could see it for what it was. It wasn't a plane; wasn't even a planet; it was a partitioner. It was massive, spanning hundreds of miles across space in every direction. The thing had to be far bigger than a planet, maybe bigger than perhaps even the stars. There was no curvature like a planet would have, so to my perception it extended infinitely, further than even the celestial light of the stars and nebulae. Whatever it was, it separated one side from the other, but why. My amazement and my thoughts were interrupted by the feeling of something pulling on my body.
I had come to the realisation that I was no longer moving on my own accord. Something had gripped my entire body with an invisible, indescribable feeling. Whatever it was, I found that it was slowly pulling me upwards, awy from the plane and further towards the constellations. It pulled me far faster than I could ever go by simply walking and yet after a while it felt completely normal, like I was on a boat crossing a wide lake, or walking on a bridge from one land to another. Slowly the stars of the night sky began to grow bigger and bigger with my approach, bloating from dots to orbs to giant celestial bodies which surrounded me on every side.
Now the light was overwhelming. Every inch, every empty space was illuminated by the combined light of thousands upon thousands of titanic stars and suns. An eerie vibration filled my ears, ricocheting through my brain, and I understood immediately what they were saying. It was words. The stars were speaking. They must have been. So I listened.
Come. Come. The Stars whispered as one. I asked them who they were and only spoke louder within my mind. Come! Come! They echoed. Come, Ur-Man!
The pulling became lax. I realised that they must have been the ones that was pulling me here, but I didn't know where I was going. The indescribable grip on my being eventually loosened entirely, and I began to walk on my own accord again. Now the stars surrounded me on every side. Their warmth made me shiver and sweat in the void but I didn't care. They had formed a huge crowd, spanning countless solar miles in every direction, but a clear path through the titanic beings was lit up by the constellations far above. I trekked through the crowds of stars and despite being flesh and blood I could walk among them like I was one of them. They welcomed me with gaseous arms splayed to the width of solar systems and shook my hand with twirling solar flares that burnt my skin. Ur-Man! Oh Ur-Man! They chanted. Rejector of The Pantheon! Hand of all Mankind!
I didn't understand what they meant by that. But whatever querys and wonders were quickly cleared as I saw what lay ahead of me. A giant pillar. Nothing compared to the stars, but it could be seen clearly from miles away. The stars followed my gaze and known I had seen it. They continued to chant within my mind, then as one prostrated to the pillar. I crossed the distance between myself and the pillar, clambered my way to the very top, and ontop of the pillar a giant meteor awaited me. Go to it! The stars echoed from all around me. It beckons! It beckons!
I approached the meteor and cambered onto its rocky uneven bulk. It was warm to the touch, and with my touch it began to move. It shuddered in motion then levitated itself off the massive pillar. It turned to an unclear focal point ahead of me and began to accelerate, first only going a brisk pace then sped up faster and faster. The stars lined my path like a celestial parody of a parade, where they numbered in the thousands and they screamed and cheered my name. I rode through space, weaving through constellations and nebulae, and the stars receded in the far distance. I went further, so far out that I could no longer even see the great featureless divider. I went faster and faster, until I think space began to run out. I didn't stop for something as worthless as space, and I smashed through it.
And now, I had entered the brightest place I've ever seen. Brighter than the divider. Brighter than even the place of the Stars. This was a place of infinite sensation and expanse, where affluent streams of gases and stardust roiled and frothed and expanded for millions of miles in every direction. It was where reality was a maelstrom of incomprehensible colors, all so bright and impossible that my weak human eyes were burnt to cinders in their sockets. But I still cambered off the meteor, fell onto my knees and wept nonexistent tears at the illuminated beauty of it all. Somewhere between pathetic sobs, the stars began to split and fold on themselves. Nebulae streams roiled and bubbled until they burst like blossoming fungi. That beautiful miasma of color dimmed, shuddering and dying, and with its death came everything else. The world dimmed, until all that remained, standing atop a monolith of dying stars was who had called me here.
THEM. All five of them.
THEY took a step forward as one and in an eternity and an attosecond bridged the thousand-light-year gap between us both. Whatever happened next, I don't know. Everything shuddered like a corrupted video file and refused to play. Then the Void began to shudder. Whatever THEY did, I don't know nor could I remember. After an infinitely indefinite time THEY had conveyed whatever they wanted to, and receded as one like frothing water. But with the departure the void was split apart. And in its place a great ball of golden fire filled my vision. It barreled across the void as if propelled by the hand of God himself, tearing through dying stars and corpses of nebulae and bashing shattered planetoids out of the way. I moved to run, screaming bloody murder but no amount of running would save me. I screamed as it collided into me.
And after that there was a sensation of being passed atom-by-atom through a screaming star. Then the star winked shut and reality shattered apart.
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